Here, I'm going to say all the things I didn't say in the previously quoted conversation, now that I'm seeing them from a little more distance. As always, this will likely be an impractically long-winded, meandering and incomplete exploration of my thoughts, with a dash of ranting and some obscure philosophy, probably only interesting to me. But hey, what are blogs for if not self-indulgence, right?
I have been accused of being a relativist (aka "self-condemned"), and this, as far as I can tell, is because I think people other than me, and people other than evangelical Christians, can be right, and can have valid thoughts and experiences. I am certainly a bit of a relativist, but here's a few clarifications:
1) There is a whole world between the statement "all viewpoints are equally valid" and "only the post-Reformation (Protestant) Western evangelical viewpoint is valid." I inhabit that wide open space between these two comically simple extremes.
2) This is an ethical issue for me, a conviction I have, and that's part of why it would take a whole lot of convincing, at this point, for me to turn around. Love is, at its most fundamental level, an ability to recognize another person in their particularity, in their distinction from you, and to appreciate, understand, and even admire that difference.
3) It's also an issue of rationality. It is obvious that one's upbringing and surrounding culture has a profound and inescapable effect on the way one conceives of truth, the supernatural, and so on. If this is the case, then I must ask: why does the upbringing that I have received just happen to be the "right" one? Wouldn't I obviously think that, since it is my upbringing that has defined for me what is right?
I keep being told that words like "truth" and "goodness" coming from my mouth mean nothing, because I say all things are good and true (which I've actually never said, by the way). What has really happened, in my own life, is not a dissolving of goodness into an unqualified yes to everything, but a reordering of very real and substantial goods that I recognize. I've identified which goods are most important to me (e.g., love, personal commitment, human agency, the right to life and freedom from coercion, intellectual honesty, etc.), and I've attempted to work these goods out to their logical conclusions. Since (it's my belief that) goods, at least in this life, are fragmented, since all good things don't fit together, then when one chooses her highest goods, her 'hypergoods,' as Charles Taylor calls them, she's going to end up diminishing other goods and even losing some. The goods I hold all revolve around what I think it means to love another human being, and in the process, other goods become relativized, such as certainty, orthodoxy...Actually, I'm now showing how thoroughly I have embraced as supreme the goods that I hold, because I can't even really think of what of value that I'm losing by embracing them.
Also, apparently intellectual honesty is really important to me, because this is what has primarily transformed my ideas about biblical authority, about what the Bible says and how it should function. I just don't think it says what Christians say it says. And also, where it says things that come in conflict with a spirit of love and rights to life and freedom from coercion, whatever is being said cannot somehow be morally obligatory. When it ascribes violations of rights to God "Him"self, either the author is projecting himself onto God, the events described have no grounding in actually history, or else these passages demonstrate that God is not a loving God, which may or may not be cause for abandoning this God.
But let's bring this back around to relativism. All this talk about hypergoods: it's very helpful to me, because it helps show that one can be ethical, moral even, and still disagree with me, because the goods that person embraces are different than those I embrace. At the same time, it allows me to affirm the authentic goodness of the goods I espouse. It takes some explaining to demonstrate why the goods I choose as hypergoods deserve such an exalted status, but I think the justification is there.
But let's be honest, most Christians won't even glance at this model, because for them, everything comes down the Bible. They are convinced that every breath of it is the divine Word of God, and thus, no matter how absurd its stories, how morally reprehensible its admonitions may get, "God said it, I believe it, end of story." My problem is that the typical American Christian's understanding of what the Bible contains is vastly different than what it actually contains, and that Christians don't live up to the kind of absolute-talk that they find so blasphemously absent in folks like me. They say the Bible is inerrant, but where is Isaiah 63, where is 1 Kings 22 or Genesis 22 or Job or Leviticus or Ezra in their teaching? They say they want to hear what the Bible says, but they neglect the staggering diversity it holds, the interbiblical critiques. They gloss over the way Job and Ecclesiastes are flat contradictions of Proverbs, the fact that our canon contains 4 different Gospels. For some reason, they just refuse to admit that books like Genesis and Isaiah were written by multiple people and edited over time, and that Job and the creation narrative and don't have to be historically factual to be true. This is terrifying and even heresy to some of them.
And even better, they want to claim the Bible as the foundation for everything they believe, yet the doctrines they care most about (the Trinity, their doctrine of biblical authority/inerrancy itself, the hypostatic union, Augustinian anthropology, etc.) didn't come from the Bible, but from the conciliar movement, and from Martin Luther. This is, of course, because the Bible isn't a doctrinal book, a systematic theology. It's a bundle of stories, poems, letters and songs. But if one wants to imitate this methodology and speak of God primarily through story and emotion and particularity instead of in absolute and universal terms? HERETIC. What matters is the system, the intellectual assent to key propositional statements, this is what is going to save me. It's not about the kind of person you choose to be, or your connection to God, it's about which team you're on. I want no part of that, and I can't see how it could seem true or appealing.
Alright, this has gotten too long, so I'll stop. Maybe I'll pick it up again soon.
No comments:
Post a Comment